On Thursday, 22 February 2007, Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor dizzied viewers with spin about lie detectors.

Last week, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly challenged "Prince" Frederic von Anhalt (the elderly husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor) to take a lie detector test regarding his claim to have fathered the infant daughter of the late Anna Nicole Smith. Von Anhalt agreed, and this week O'Reilly hired retired FBI polygrapher Jack Trimarco to administer the "test."

Ultimately, Von Anhalt, an obvious poseur (who got his title of "Prince" by paying a member of the defunct German aristocracy to legally adopt him as an adult), backed out of the polygraph.

But O'Reilly did speak with Jack Trimarco about polygraphy, and Trimarco made some misrepresentations that stand in need of correction. Significantly, Trimarco asserted that science shows that polygraphy is 93% accurate. This claim is contradicted by the National Academy of Sciences, which in its 2003 report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection concluded: (emphasis added) "Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy." Indeed, the consensus scientific viewpoint is that polygraphic lie detection has no scientific basis at all.

Trimarco also stated, without qualification, that polygraph evidence is admissible in federal courts. While in some rare instances polygraph evidence has been deemed admissible, it is not generally so. Trimarco's remark left the opposite impression.

Please help set Bill O'Reilly straight on lie detectors by sending a polite e-mail message to him at oreilly@foxnews.com.

For further commentary, see Jack Trimarco Spins the Polygraph on The O'Reilly Factor on the AntiPolygraph.org News blog.